Today's article is about figurative art, and for that I caught up with emerging artist Bazévian, who is primarily a portrait artist specializing in capturing the homeless using oil pastel and china ink.

Bazévian is originally from the north of France, and he grew up under the auspices of art because both his mother and grandmother were artists. "I was exposed to art very early. My grandmother and mother were artists, too. However, in the case of my mother, she is more a copyist. When I was young, there were in my home several copies of Van Gogh, Klimt, Gauguin. My grandmother’s watercolor paintings were also on the wall along with a large collection of artist books."

He eventually went to Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland to study Graphic Design before he made the move full-time to visual artist. But it was in Norway where he first met his inspiration to paint homeless people, and it was in Brazil where he really developed his idea. "I started to work on the project when I was living in Norway, which is a rich country.I have always admired the ability of Norway to care about poor people. So when I arrived in Brazil, that was a shock when I saw the first kid and family sleeping on the street.As a result, I became a witness to society and tried to develop a long series of portraits of homeless people and orphans."

It was three years ago when he started the project when the economy was struggling, but the issue doesn't stop there. He focuses mostly on portraits because, for him, the face is a vital part of how we express ourselves. "I started three years ago a series of studies (Decrisation) based on the human condition, especially the faces of homeless people. Face is meaning and language. It is obviously the location for the expressions and emotions which give information about the character. However, the face is also the only part of the body that is normally exposed and naked. We can't hide it in our society. So every day, when we look at faces, they talk. Moreover, when we look at a face, we choose to accept the social conditions of this person. That's why the portrait has a significant place in my work."

Bazévian also believes that art functions the same way, regardless of style or technique. "...the artist expresses himself through his work and the spectator tries to read it, using his emotional sense.In my mind, whether you liked a piece or not, that the painting gives emotion or feeling." And it's the old masters who he admires most because they had an uncommon passion and dedication only to their work. It was that passion that drove them to create pieces with such great emotion in the end.

I asked him one final question, which I always ask my artists: What advice would you give to someone who wants to buy art? Not surprisingly, his answer was: "Buy a painting which gives you feeling and emotion."

As I do often when I have some time to kill, I float through the Internet looking for ways to improve as an artist. Sometimes I stumble on basic instructions such as this one about shape and form. I find these basic instruction sites helpful because it helps to remind me the fundamentals. However, I much prefer to take the next level. That's why I was happy to have found Keene Wilson's art notes for the advanced artist. Wilson does a great job of just listing things to remember. These are his notes (as explained here at Wetcanvas.com), so they aren't meant to be a book or step-by-step how-to on how to do things better. Instead, these are things one should remember.

Gothic Quarter - Barcelona

I'm a painter first, but drawing is an important part of developing a painting. I often try to draw something about 10-20 times on paper before I finally draw it on canvas. Since I work primarily with strong colors, this helps to get my mind in a place to understand where the light is.

For example, here is what he puts under drawing basics, which is only the beginning of his substantial list of items:

Basics

Draw what you see, and if you can’t see, draw what you know

Show soft corners, nearest observer

Observe angles, arcs, verticals and horizontals

Observe both sides of the form, draw into the form, not just the contours

Use structure and symmetry

Use overlap

Use errors to improve the drawing, start lightly and don’t erase

Get the gesture first

Move from general to particular

Pre-painting sketch on canvas done after many trials on paper

Increase the contrast. Make all areas in the light a little lighter than you see them, and all areas in the shadow a little darker than you see them. The object is to make all lighted areas hold together as one group, as should the shadow areas. Otherwise, the subject will not hold together; it will lose validity. – Fred Fixler

Even in a sketch, have something implying the background

You need to know how to make something unimportant as well as important [focus]

Should not have line driven style and shape driven style in the same picture.

My advice is draw as much as you can, even if you're a sculptor, painter, or if you do installations. Drawing helps build not only skills but also ideas, too. I hope the link above, which has many more than what I listed here, helps you out.

As a writer, Viaro is currently working on abstract short stories, but it's abstract as an idea that influences him: "In my working room I’m surrounded by abstract paintings by Guido Viaro," he says. "I love all Kandinsky, perhaps for his previous studies of proportions and colors. I love Paul Klee for his fake innocence. I love Jorge Luis Borges for his short story “The Aleph”. I love Ingmar Bergman for his film “The Seventh Seal”. I love Franz Schubert for his quartet “The death and the maiden”."

He continues by showing how it's not just about words, sculpture, or oil either: "I also had directed a short-length documentary about the Brazilian artist Jair Mendes, who started painting figurative and slowly changed into abstract. I do like abstract in many forms of art, cinema, dance."

Art influences across fields, so I chose as my first subject Guido Viaro who has published 12 novels to date and is also the grandson of the Italian-Brazilian painter of the same name. Viaro is also the director of the museum that houses a large number of his grandfather's works. For disclosure's sake, I exhibited at the museum in May 2014. You can view Viaro's site here for more information: Guido Viaro.